IBM has tapped some powerful brains to divine their take on the future of innovation.
IBM has some very bright sparks on its staff. It stature means that the company can also tap into a lot of collective wisdom in the outside world. So there is an inclination to attach a little more weight to a glimpse into the future of innovation from these forces than from the academics or consultants who do this sort of thing for a living. The odd thing about the latest edition of IBM's Global Innovation Outlook (GIO) is that Big Blue has done little to tout its existence. You even have to know where to look on the company's web site.
The company says that the GIO exercise "provides a platform for some of the world's most interesting thinkers-provocateurs and pragmatists alike-to engage in a series of open, candid and freewheeling conversations about important issues of our day, from healthcare to the environment, the role of government to the future of the enterprise". The result is "Global Innovation Outlook 2.0," a catchy title, but one that they may regret when they come to produce the next version and no one is talking about Web 2.0.
There's plenty of good stuff in the GIO, we'll look at some of them in a bit, but let's kick off with a more general thought on the innovation process. Are we wasting a lot of time in pursuit of "the bleeding obvious"?
As one participant in the GIO put it: "The best brains in the world are busy solving problems that don't really need to be solved. They're struggling to design a better watch or struggling to design some fancy product. Why don't they work on designing better slums? Billions of people live in absolutely miserable conditions, and that needs to be fixed."
The challenge of business, of course, is to find ways to make money out of solving these problems.
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